Dust to Dust
by LittleLongHairedOutlaw
Summary: Western AU. Their son grows tall and proud. There is something of his mother in his fingers, and of his father in his features, and of the godfather he never knew in his music. He follows the path of those who went before, and is never alone. Charoga. Past Christine/Erik/Daroga


**A/N: The last of the Delta stories. A follow-up to 'Meet You At the Delta', 'Run into the Sea', and 'When It Feels Like Nothing Else Matters'. And for this one, you might need to have read some of what went before. But they're all short! And please do review, if you enjoy it.**

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He grows up tall, and he grows up strong. His mother's blue eyes, his father's soft dark hair, in delicate curls. He wears blues and greens and golds to offset his skin, laughs easily and smiles brightly. There is an emerald stone in his left ear, and gold rings on his fingers. When the war comes, he has no taste for fighting in it.

What are other men's wars, when there is music?

He plays many things, his own pieces, and those of the man he calls his godfather though he died before he was born, and he sings only occasionally, though he's been told he has a wonderful voice. He knew notes and keys before he learned how to spell.

He favors Chopin on old pianos.

(There's a J.P. Hale square grand in Tombstone that sounds just fine, and he plays the Mazurka in F minor as softly as if there was a child asleep in the next room, the way his mother taught him.)

In May of 1918, his father contracts a flu that goes straight to his chest. His father is far from a young man, and has not been well anyway, but the flu lays him out, and while he lies there burning with fever, pillows under his back to keep him propped up as he brings up blood foul and dark, he mistakes his son for a man thirty years in the grave, who his son has never met, and who he bears no resemblance to, other than a shared first name.

The pain of it cuts straight to his heart.

(He tries not to see the grief in his father's eyes, though the story of it is older than he is, and he knows it as well as he knows himself.)

It is only through his mother's tender care that his father survives, and after the fever breaks, she sits outside for a long time, under the stars, twisting the rings she wears on her fingers.

(He develops the same flu, but it is mild and passes. He has a strong constitution, has been fit and healthy all of his life, and there is no weakness in his lungs.)

He keeps a map, of all the places he has been, and all the places he has yet to be. He marks them off one at a time, and has no intention of succumbing to romance until he has been through them all.

The entire state of Utah he rides through on horseback as befits the stories he's heard of it. The dust kicked up his horse forms whispers that might almost be ghosts.

In Helena the hairs on his arms prickle, and every time he turns a corner he feels as if he is being watched. He keeps a knife tucked safe inside his boot.

Tucson makes his blood cry out and he gets into a drunken fight that lands him in a cell for two nights.

Dodge City is a shadow of how it was forty years ago but through half-closed eyes he sees how it might have been, and understands how his parents talk of it with fondness.

Glenwood is full of ghosts, but Glenwood he knows better than anywhere else in the world. He has visited it once a year for every year of his life, and will visit it every year he has yet to live (and it is a good many, though of course he has no way to know that).

In Cheyenne there is a girl. Tumbling blonde curls and sloe dark eyes. The daughter of a cavalry captain and a ballerina. He tells her he is a traveling musician, and it is not quite a lie because he plays music wherever he can and the piano is the only thing that makes his thoughts stop racing. She smiles, and her lips are soft against his, her hands gentle on his skin, as she lays him down.

Her father tells him he has a remarkable memory for music.

The words feel as if he should have heard them before.

(The ex-captain also tells him there is something familiar in his face, but he is certain he has never seen the man before, and part of him wonders if he is always bound to follow the trails of ghosts and consumptives and gamblers, or is it just that those are all there has been to create the stories of his world?)

Kaycee is barely a town, but it is there he meets an artist with elegant wrists and long fingers, who smiles wryly at him from a knowing face and whose lips are misleadingly thin for how soft they are.

The artist lays him down beneath the stars, and kisses him, and touches him, and he feels things he never knew it was possible to feel (though it was there in every story he was ever told, hidden beneath the surface, sacred pieces unspoken) his heart throbbing as they lie together a tangle of limbs.

The artist has a mildly persistent cough, legacy of bronchitis, but he is the most beautiful man he has ever seen.

The two of them occupy his thoughts, the girl with the sloe eyes, the artist with the thin wrists. They live behind his eyes, and whisper to him every time he sleeps, and even alone beneath the stars he feels as if he might almost touch them, if he would only reach out.

He makes his annual pilgrimage back to Glenwood in November, the mountains calling to something in his bones, and visits the graveyard where the man who first wore his name lies.

He is, perhaps, the one who would understand best, how it is to love two people at once, how it is to have music burning in his fingertips.

(He never could have met him, but he often finds himself wishing he might have, and sometimes there is a shadow in his dreams, with a soft voice and golden eyes, and half a face that he's only seen in portraits, with lips that look as if they might always be half-smiling. The shadow is more a wraith than a man, but it lays long fingers to piano keys, and plays them with all the solemnity of worship, and its laugh is high and breathless.)

(Even when there is no one else with him, he never feels alone.)

The war ends the next day, but how can he celebrate the end of something he never cared about except in the most abstract of ways? Acts of war are the concerns of others, and he holds himself to a different ideal.

He saddles a good horse, and thinks of the girl in Cheyenne, the artist in Kaycee, and leaves Glenwood in the dust, the first flakes of snow framed dark against the grey sky.


End file.
